Recently, PaXini Tech, a tactile recognition and humanoid robot company, received a strategic investment of more than 100 million yuan from BYD. This is BYD's first large-scale equity investment this year, and it is also reportedly the largest single investment BYD has made in the field of embodied intelligence to date.
According to official information, PaXini was founded in June 2021. The company can realize independent control of high-precision multi-dimensional tactile sensors and has a complete multi-dimensional tactile "sensor-dexterous hand-humanoid robot" product matrix.
It is worth noting that the founding members of Pasini are from the Sugano Robotics Laboratory at Waseda University in Japan, the birthplace of the world's first humanoid robot. The founding members developed an innovative 6D hole array tactile sensor.
Tactile sensors are said to be the key to robot "perceptual awakening" and are also one of China's 35 "bottleneck" technologies.
The sensor gives the robot human-like tactile recognition ability, while building a full-stack embodied intelligence technology system, from hardware packaging, data collection, and algorithm integration to building the first VTLA embodied intelligence model.
According to the official website, the 6D hole array tactile sensor can achieve ultra-fast tactile sampling time of 1 million times per second and simultaneously capture 15 types of tactile perception information, including 6-dimensional force (3D force + 3D torque), material, temperature, and rebound force.
And with a full-scale fine force recognition ability of 0.01N, it performs 1000Hz high frequency output, far exceeding that of humans, providing embodied intelligence with industry-leading human-like rich and delicate tactile interaction information.
It is reported that this is the second investment BYD has made in the embodied intelligence field in two years since the launch of Zhiyuan Robotics, which focuses on tactile sensing technology.
Through this cooperation, Pasini's technology will realize cooperation scenarios with BYD in many fields and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results. BYD will continue to take the initiative and lead the way in the intelligentization and industrial layout of the automotive industry.
BYD's strategic investment may be to deeply penetrate the industry's discourse power into the underlying core technology links and ensure the technology route.
In the future, those who master the physical interface of tactile perception will hold the key to the industrialization of humanoid robots.